Ray Succre currently lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and baby son. He has been published in Aesthetica, BlazeVOX, and Pank, as well as in numerous others across as many countries. His novel Tatterdemalion (Cauliay Publishing) is forthcoming in early 2008. He tries hard. For inquiry, publication history, and information, you can visit Ray online: http://raysuccre.blogspot.com

Fourteen Months

This infant's firstling steps and words
sparrow long with vowels and stutter,
blank against a rhyme of age,
caesuras flocked in rapid parts.

A pause to watch him walk and speak,
catch him say and step with troubles,
sets me glad to know that I, a man,
early on as my birth and inflection,
from informal conceiving and hopes,
didn’t have to talk either.

 

Missing Six-Year-Olds

Their parents, police spokespersons,
were just being worried—hazards
crawl quickly, are found playing in
Summer traffic and runaway tumbles,
on beaches and woodtrails,
command posts for parents
nosed with viral caution.

The news collected, intoxicated,
chartered by sweeping rake-fans
through woods and dunes.
Outsiders came from surrounding
counties possessed by a social
monster, a helpful ghoul from
mediation and Mayberry.

The two kids were found at the
high school trying to operate a
payphone. It had been three days.
They’d come out of the woods near
the school’s football field.

Cameras circled and televisions
followed, interviews were blossomed
freely as from the ground,
and articles were written, such articles
that they soon overflowed into
daily columns and letters-to.

Oregon survived, the kids survived,
and the parents, all of it
a fluttering electricity found in
birds and boxes along the coast.

 

After Fortune Draws Length

What more after a Tugman Park wedding,
what pelting prods, might the
intimate papers expect?
Viscera, why, even
the guts are lividly loved platitudes,

some other’s print of smudged-over lips
on my just-hot, porcelain cup,
is and of my likes
ignored as by a pleasantest;
no essences of her trace disquiet me.

What more after a surgical suite reception,
the baby of brushed hair,
reach-to-doorknobs bright,
has the hands of streets and guesswork lines;
no rocky hill should pose him go aside.

What more after life is a life to acquire,
when even the bull notion
can be settled with a thought?

Points in a Stroll

Dimmed enough to live in great, full graves,
or in silver shots from graphic eyes,
so subtle as to be conformed in either place,
enticements do not grow, but grow people up
from a capacious nowhere.

If you have ever waited on urgency or wanting…

They and all the Bo-Peep likes,
in damaged kindnesses, in pleasures,
in liminal volatility and other cruel delights,
enticements, are what bring caprice,
are as weaving motions of wicker strands,
caught and catching, met, the lovelier
deportments of human sincerity.

Paced in the present, and delicate,
enticements are as open directions in short
walks, points in a stroll, unable to breathe
without your carrying on.